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Independent research finds it notable that American liquor ads undergo a sea change in the early 1950s, from which point the subliminal signaling becomes more complicated. Class markers enter the picture, then sublimated sexual signals. In this abbreviated survey the change occurs with image #5, those disembodied phantom hands preparing the sixty year lost weekend at the end of which humans dwelling in this damaged land can't wake up from the nightmare which is their ersatz secular history, i.e. the only kind of history they will ever have.

Linking mass marketing to unconscious desires wasn't built in a day. In a brilliant BBS documentary called The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis traces the story of modern advertising back to Sigmund Freud and several of his relatives and acolytes.

The first figure in Curtis's version of the history is Freud's nephew Edward Bernays. "An honest boy when I knew him," uncle Sigmund later said of Bernays. "I know not how far he has become americanized."

Once prosperity overcame America in the 1950s, nobody needed all that product, but the system depended on somebody buying it anyway, so...

Freud, for his part, writing to the British psychiatrist Ernest Jones in the 1930s, opined that "America is a gigantic mistake".

Freud was no adman of course, but his emigré disciples in the American advertising industry took his basic idea about the role of the irrational in human behaviour, made it feel at home in a suburban consumer focus group, and the rest is that long lost weekend mentioned above.

An interesting condensed history of the mind control strategies demonstrated in this branch of the ad industry can be seen in this collection of alcohol adverts, 1840-2000.